Famous road trips

Some drive people apart, others bring them together.

Neal Cassady and Jack Kerouac. The poets' drug- and drink-fogged car trips through the Southwest and Mexico inspired the Beat movement and Kerouac's most famous novel, "On the Road." Little-known fact: Cassady was born by the side of the road in Utah in 1926. His parents were on a road trip.

A writer, a doctor and Einstein's brain. Writer Michael Paterniti drove a Buick Skylark cross-country with the eccentric doctor who had performed Einstein's autopsy. The third passenger was Einstein's brain, which the doctor had kept for more than 30 years. Paterniti and the doctor never seemed to warm, but the writer did bond with the Tupperware-encased brain, once sleeping with it on the pillow next to him.

Charles Starkweather and Caril Ann Fugate. Apparently nothing unites a couple like a multistate killing spree. In the 1950s, after Starkweather killed her family, the 13-year-old Fugate accompanied him through the Midwest. He robbed and killed eight others, but Fugate stuck with him until the cops closed in.

Lewis and Clark. More than two years on a trail, surviving bad weather, bear attacks and robbers, you'd think the famous explorers would have had at least one blow-out. None was ever recorded. In fact, historians say the two were so tight, they'd often reach the same decisions separately.

"The Boys on the Bus." Author Timothy Crouse spent months on the road with packs of reporters covering the 1972 Nixon and McGovern presidential campaigns. Apparently the "freakish, insulated" press bus bonded the pack members so much, they lost their objectivity. Say it isn't so.

— Seattle Times editors